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Being in the World (Of Warcraft): Raiding, Realism, and Knowledge Production in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game

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Being in the World (Of Warcraft): Raiding, Realism, and Knowledge Production in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game Being in the World (of Warcraft): Raiding, Realism, and Knowledge Production in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game Alex Golub University of Hawaii Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 83, No. 1, pp. 17–46, ISSN 0003-549. © 2010 by the Institute for Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved. Abstract This paper discusses two main claims made about virtual worlds: first, that people become “immersed” in virtual worlds because of their sensorial realism, and second, because virtual worlds appear to be “places” they can be studied without reference to the lives that their inhabitants live in the actual world. This paper argues against both of these claims by using data from an ethnographic study of knowledge production in World of Warcraft. First, this data demonstrates that highly-committed (“immersed”) players of World of Warcraft make their interfaces less sensorially realistic (rather than more so) in order to obtain useable knowledge about the game world. In this case, immersion and sensorial realism may be inversely correlated. Second, their commitment to the game leads them to engage in knowledge-making activities outside of it. Drawing loosely on phenomenology and contemporary theorizations of Oceania, I argue that what makes games truly “real” for players is the extent to which they create collective projects of action that people care about, not their imitation of sensorial qualia. Additionally, I argue that while purely in-game research is methodologically legitimate, a full account of member’s lives must study the articulation of in-game and out-of-game worlds and trace people’s engagement with virtual worlds across multiple domains, some virtual and some actual. [Keywords: knowledge production, phenomenology, virtual worlds, World of Warcraft, Second Life, video games, raiding] Personally I really enjoy pushing the pace, challenging myself: how hard, how efficient I could be, how much I could push damage, how I could survive. That sort of thing was the first reason why I chose to raid, and that continues to be a motivating factor. Eventually it really became about when you achieve common goals, as a group you really build strong camaraderie and strong connections. When you’re raiding in Molten Core and you’re killing bosses for the first time and doing server firsts or close to server firsts, it was [sic] an incredible high. And the amount of people yelling on vent when we killed Ragnaros was amazing. It was like nothing has even been louder. There will always be those first kills that I remember. — HolyHealz, raid leader of Power Aeternus We affirm the specificity of the human act, which cuts across the social milieu while still holding on to its determinations, and which transforms the world on the basis of given conditions. For us, man is characterized above all by his going beyond a situation, and by what he succeeds in making of what he has been made. —Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method In retrospect, Julian Dibbell’s 1993 Village Voice piece “A Rape in Cyberspace” was the beginning of a high-water mark in the first generation of studies of virtual worlds. The worlds Dibbell wrote about were alphanumeric contraptions in which people’s sociality consisted of great walls of texts flowing across their screens. His achievement was to demonstrate that something as abstract as a database of typed descriptions of rooms could become a world which was deeply compelling for those who inhabited it. While many remember the content of Dibbel’s piece, few remember the original subtitle: “How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society” (Dibbell 1993). Indeed, sixteen years later, visually realistic, three dimensional, persistent virtual worlds have become so successful and ubiquitous that we have trouble remembering how surprising people found it in the mid-1990s that databases could be turned into worlds at all (for a history of virtual worlds, see Bartle 2004:4-31). In this article, I seek to turn the table on Dibbell’s original piece. Rather than describe people who turn databases into worlds, I will describe a community which has taken a virtual world and turned it back into a database. My topic is the lives of medium-core raiders in World of Warcraft, the most popular massively multiplayer online game in the United States. Raiding (large-scale set piece battles between a team of twenty-five players and computer-controlled monsters called “bosses”) requires players to overcome contingency-filled encounters through coordinated action. In order to “down” (kill) bosses effectively, raiders decompose the realistic visual and audio fields of the game into simpler models of the underlying game state, creating useful forms of knowledge (Chen 2009). This example of knowledge creation in the service of goal attainment challenges existing understandings of the realism and placeness of virtual worlds. Many have argued that virtual worlds are compelling to their inhabitants because of the sensorial realism of these worlds. On this account, virtual worlds are immersive because they look and sound (and perhaps one day will taste, feel, and smell) like ours (for a brief review of “realism” as a term of art in art history and its relation to three dimensional virtual spaces, see Poole 2000:112-136). Other theories, implicitly undergirded by this commitment to sensorial realism, argue that virtual worlds are “places” and hence legitimate research locations for academic fieldwork which can be conducted “in its own terms” and without reference to other locations, both virtual and actual. In contrast to approaches which speak a language of sensorial realism, I draw loosely on phenomenology to develop the concept of “project” in order to better understand raiding. Raiders become committed to the collective project of raiding, I argue, and this structure of care in turn leads to a proliferation of sociotechnical systems which break down the graphical realism of the game and create forms of knowledge. It is this commitment to the group project of raiding, rather than sensorial immersion in virtual worlds, which is the true cause of the remarkable dedication of the raiders I will describe below. My argument is particularly relevant as anthropology turns its attention to virtual worlds. In one recent influential book, Boellstorff has argued that we ought to imagine virtual worlds as being like Pacific islands, and thus amenable to study using traditional anthropological methods (Boellstorff 2008), creating a fieldwork imaginary which legitimates both virtual worlds and the anthropologists who study them, by hearkening back to the canonical ethnographies of Firth, Malinowski, and Mead. But such a comparison misrepresents both the ethnographic ambitions of Pacific anthropologists and the dynamic, multiply-connected nature of Pacific Islanders themselves. In contrast, I will argue that the sociotechnical systems created and deployed by raiders ramify beyond the magic circle of World of Warcraft onto websites, Internet telephony servers, and actual-world gatherings. Bringing contemporary theorizations of Oceania into dialogue with a phenomenological account of projects of action, I argue, will lead us to a more complete understanding of virtual worlds —one that will help us recapture the insights of Dibbell’s original work, which showed so clearly and powerfully that a world does not have to look like our own to matter to us, and that our care for it becomes part and parcel of our biography as a whole. In doing so, I argue that an anthropology of virtual worlds should learn from studies of Oceania and imagine its subject to be systems of meanings and commitments which spread across multiple locations, rather than discrete places which have a “culture.” Realism, Immersion, Place, Field Dibbell’s “A Rape In Cyberspace” was set in a MUD, or multiple-user dungeon: one of many text-only virtual worlds which proliferated throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, and spawned a large and sophisticated literature (for example, Smith and Kollock 1999, Cherney and Weise 1996, Kendall 2002; for literature reviews on virtual worlds see Wellman 2004, Wilson and Peterson 2003, Boellstorff 2008:32-60). No sooner had text-only worlds blossomed before it appeared they would be replaced by immersive “virtual realities,” which would produce qualia as realistic as those experienced in the actual world. Envisioned first in science fiction classics such as True Names (Vinge 1981), Neuromancer (Gibson 1984), and Snowcrash (Stephenson 1992), the idea of sensorially realistic virtual worlds grew in popularity in the early nineties as authors such as Howard Rheingold popularized emergent technologies which seemed to promise the imminent feasibility of their construction (Rheingold 1992). By the late nineties, however, the development of haptic interfaces and virtual reality goggles sputtered out, and it became increasingly clear that science fiction’s vision of a future world littered with virtual realities would not come to pass. At the same time, the rise of the Internet and the blogs, wikis, and social network sites it supported indicated that “cyberspace is necessarily a multiple-participant environment” and “the almost mystical euphoria” that surrounded “DataGloves, head-mounted displays, special-purpose rendering engines” was “both excessive and misplaced” (Morningstar and Farmer 1991). Relationships, not realism, seemed to be central to future technologies. Rheingold himself concurred. In his 2003 review of emerging technologies, he admitted that “the past ten years of VR have not been as exciting as the original idea was or as I had thought they would be” (Rheingold 2003:89). Rather, the “world of the twenty-first century” would be one in which “computers would be built into reality rather than the other way around” (Rheingold 2003:82) via technologies such as ubiquitous and tangible computing and mobile telephony. “Science fiction has disserved us,” wrote Philip Agre presciently.
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